Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Businesses

Adobe Forces Creative Cloud Users Into Pricier AI-Focused Plan (theverge.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the same-old-Adobe dept.
Adobe will rebrand its Creative Cloud All Apps subscription to "Creative Cloud Pro" on June 17 for North American users, making significant price increases while bundling AI features. Individual annual subscribers will see monthly rates jump from $59.99 to $69.99, while monthly non-contracted subscribers face a $15 hike to $104.99.

The revamped plan includes unlimited generative AI image credits, 4,000 monthly "premium" AI video and audio credits, access to third-party models like OpenAI's GPT, and the beta Firefly Boards collaborative whiteboard. Adobe will also offer a cheaper "Creative Cloud Standard" option at $54.99 monthly with severely reduced AI capabilities, but this plan remains exclusive to existing subscribers -- forcing new customers into the pricier AI-focused tier.

Adobe Forces Creative Cloud Users Into Pricier AI-Focused Plan More | Reply

Adobe Forces Creative Cloud Users Into Pricier AI-Focused Plan

Comments Filter:

  • Like a drug addiction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @01:25PM (#65390923) Homepage Journal

    The first one's always free. Hook 'em first, then crank up the price.

    The only good policy towards Adobe (and subscription apps in general) is "Just say no."

    • Re:Like a drug addiction (Score:5, Informative)

      by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @01:44PM (#65390997) Homepage

      I actually have the Adobe "Photography" Plan that recently just bumped up from $9.99/mo to $15.52/mo. ($19.95 listed on site).

      Or had, rather, since I just cancelled it. I no longer use it enough to justify the cost, and have been using Pixelmator Pro for the odd work that I needed done.

      Switching to a new program isn't easy... but it's getting easier, and I was getting tired of Adobe's incessant price increases.

      I'm also currently going through the painful process of trying to delete the apps from my machine. Apparently Adobe didn't hear about the "one click cancel/delete" rule...

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by cpurdy ( 4838085 )
        The software that I bought from Adobe stopped working and started trying to destroy my Mac. It was running and installing all sorts of daemons, and trying to remove the software would cause it to install more and more daemons, each of which was taking a few percent of the CPU capacity of the machine. Some of these were running with privileges apparently, and they were poorly written so I can only imagine how many security holes they were introducing. In the meantime, I couldn't use the software that I had p

    • Not sure if you've noticed but nearly every business these days runs on the subscription model. You can't simply "say no" anymore.

    • It's a YouTube channel if you don't know and it's pretty mediocre at best content but he did do a good video trying to show how hard it is to get off Adobe software.

      What it boiled down to is interoperability between the different employees he hires. So one guy does all the graphics for a video and another guy does the video editing and the graphics guy can just send his graphics to the video editor guy and it all just works because it's Adobe.

      Yes you can use open source alternatives to do all of tha
  • Adobe's always been high priced for the features but this is just getting sad.

  • Just Say No (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @01:41PM (#65390979)

    ..to software subscriptions

    • ..to software subscriptions

      Good luck with that. There are always going to be things for which an equally-good opensource alternative doesn't exist. And for commercial solutions, vendors invariably want recurring revenue. A similar annoyance - try to find a game for your smartphone that is ad-free and doesn't nag about in-app purchases. I would gladly pay upfront for that experience, but I think it no longer exists.

  • Fuck Adobe (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ebunga ( 95613 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @01:44PM (#65390995)

    A year of their software now costs more than the entire creative suite did back with a perpetual license, and somehow they were still a multi-billion-dollar company back then. At some point the Photoshop alternatives will be either good enough for everyone to switch en masse, or the greedy pig fuckers will raise the price to Broadcomian levels and they'll have just one customer keeping one product afloat.

    • A year of their software now costs more than the entire creative suite did back with a perpetual license.

      There's an old adage in sales that the value of a thing equals whatever someone is willing to pay for it. I completely agree that, for me, Adobe's prices are too high. But since many are willing to pay the price, I can't fault Adobe for extracting the market value.

      • He's just extracting what he wants from someone that was clearly asking for it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Sebby ( 238625 )

        I can't fault Adobe for extorting the market value.

        There FTFY.

        • I can't fault Adobe for extorting the market value.

          There FTFY.

          They don't force anyone to buy their products. People do it voluntarily.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Sebby ( 238625 )

            ... in a "got you by the balls anyways" kind of way.

            • In theory, if the price rises high enough, it should incentivize other software vendors to develop competitive products. If Adobe's lead is so far ahead that nobody can ever catch up, then it's edging close to monopoly territory. Companies with so large an advantage have been subject to government intervention before.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by unrtst ( 777550 )

        ... the value of a thing equals whatever someone is willing to pay for it ... I can't fault Adobe for extracting the market value.

        When there is no scarcity, that's not how market value works.

        By scarcity, I mean a physical thing (or things), which by their physical nature means you don't have infinite amounts of them to sell. For example, a house or a car or a horse - there is a value that the market will bare for each of those, depending on the specs of the item and the market it is in. You can sell for less and maybe do so more quickly (ex. to flip a house), or hold out to get the maximum amount out of it (don't wait too long or the

        • I'd like Ferrari to make beautiful looking but normal performance and quality cars in the $40,000 range too.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by unrtst ( 777550 )

            For many other supercar brands, that already exists. Porsce, for example, is owned by VW, and you can get a basic VW.

            I also noted there are a lot of ways to make a product more available (especially Photoshop). Your Ferrari example lines up with my second suggestion - could rent it out by the hour, and, no surprise, that's a real thing already.

    • Uh, no, not even close. CS6 master suite (with everything you get now) was $7,988 circa 2007. Photoshop alone was $700. Illustrator similar when it was a standalone product.

      Now, if you have a CS subscription long enough, year after year, yes you'll pay that much eventually. But not for one year's subscription cost, even under the new price. But unlike the old days, you're getting all the updates continually without paying $150 - $200 for upgrading one standalone piece of software like PS.

      I would sa

    • Having control of all time and space creeps close to satisfying that greed itch, but even that is not enough.

  • Once you add all the AI nonsense its really just generative. All creativity is out the door.

    • Once you add all the AI nonsense its really just generative. All creativity is out the door.

      Except you're talking out of your arse. A large feature set that Adobe provides uses AI models for non-generative stuff. Noise reduction, person detection, depth estimation for variable masking, etc.

      There's more to AI than getting it to draw a picture for you.

  • "Let us not only rip you off on purchase, but KEEP ripping you off ad infinitum!" LoL

  • Look at our AI adoption rates! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @01:49PM (#65391025)

    "But, uh, you don't offer any alternatives."

    "BUT LOOK AT OUR AI ADOPTION RATES!"

    "It shows here that you're losing subscribers."

    "BUT LOOK AT OUR AI ADOPTION RATES!"

  • Defective moden "business" at work...

  • You could have easily made pull requests to the gimp for missing features but you would rather take the easy way out. Every time i point this out i get the same excuses. Also why you are addicted to DRMed games and media.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      You could have easily made pull requests to the gimp for missing features

      hahahahahahahahahahahahHAHaHAHAHAHahahhaha

      but you would rather take the easy way out.

      Graphic artists who can't code are taking the easy way out by paying someone to do what they can't?

    • What a load of gatekeeping BS.

      When I was a GIMP user, there was a huge dustup over someone creating a fork (IIRC "GimpShop") with a better UI. There was huge resistance to 16bit/channel color, because the devs unilaterally decided it wasn't necessary.

      "Code it yourself" is useless advice. Human civilization is built on specialization. If everyone has to meet your "l33t haxx0r" standards, nothing will get done.

  • Of course I didn't have a subscription in the first place, so that might be a little awkward

  • As an existing subscriber, I will likely go with the 'reduced AI' option because I don't really use AI except for light object removal with generative fill now and then.

    I could actually live with the photographer plan but I actually use Illustrator a fair amount, and Acrobat to assemble, edit and otherwise convert and modify PDFs. I don't use much of anything else anymore.

    I'd have to check to see if there's an alternative for Illustrator that will actually work for me. (usually the 'alternatives' are miss

    • I could actually live with the photographer plan but I actually use Illustrator a fair amount, and Acrobat to assemble, edit and otherwise convert and modify PDFs. I don't use much of anything else anymore.

      You can swap out both Illustrator and Acrobat for free, open-source Inkscape [inkscape.org] and your photographer plan would work out fine. Inkscape is my favorite PDF editor FWIW.

    • In addition to Inkscape for editing PDF details, I also use this tool [github.com] to re-arrange page order. And the standard Document Viewer [gnome.org] used by Ubuntu is useful for saving annotations on PDFs.

      LibreOffice also has very good PDF capabilities, (primarily exporting as PDF while LibreOffice Draw can open and edit them like Inkscape as I recall -- Inkscape works better as I recall because I haven't used LibreOffice Draw other than testing a long time ago.).

  • Adobe's trying to take the lead in the SAAS enshitification race...

  • Commercial arts are ripe for full automation. Creativity dropped off the list of requirements for advertising decades ago. The objective of commercial art is to just be nearly the same as your competitors, so Generative AI could easily be used to create ad materials and campaigns by just copying the competition and tweaking it slightly. Car companies do this all day long. Seen one car commercial, you seen em all.

    • Car companies do this all day long. Seen one car commercial, you seen em all.

      Don't say that to Joe Isuzu [youtube.com].

      • I think that's closer to comedy than advertising. Amusing. Reminds me of "the most interesting man in the world".
        Also, I think it's fair to say that must be what ? 20 years old or older?
        There was a magical time before the internets when creativity was a prized thing.
        But
        A very smart man said this of websites sometime in the nineties, I paraphrase: people spend 99.9% of their time on other websites, so when they get to your website it should look a lot like those other ones, or people won't understand it. I c

  • Since my adblocker no longer entirely works on Slashdot, I wanted to SHARE THE AD [imgur.com] that appeared on the page accompanying all the comments of "F Adobe."

    Yeah, that AI scraping and custom advertising is a biiiiiig winner.

    • I got stuck looking at ads here also but someone here suggested the solution ... pretty simple... latest version of firefox + ublock origin should stop the suffering ... i'm using librewolf136 + unlock . No ads.

  • Surely there's alternatives to highway robbery. There must be other, better ways to get ripped off.

  • I saw this coming and... (Score:3)

    by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @04:06PM (#65391403)

    Four or five years ago I trialed Adobe's Premiere video editing suite and found it to be quite good. However, when I did some simple math it became obvious that the subscription model was going to be a huge financial penalty over the coming years so instead I opted to use Davinci Resolve.

    Resolve offers a totally *free* version of its video editing/compositing software (Adobe's trial was just a 28-day one) so that immediately warmed me to Resolve.

    After a couple of months using the *free* version of Resolve I plonked down my hard-earned cash (just US$300) to buy a "studio" license which gave me a few extra features and the satisfaction of supporting a company that was offering real value. At that time, Resolve was at version 14. Since then there have been six major new versions of the software and I'm now running the latest release. The total cost for these version upgrades has been... $0.00. Yep, Black Magic Design (the makers of Resolve) have offered all those updates and new versions to existing users at no extra cost.

    Resolve has never been sold with a "lifetime license" but this is surely as close as you can get to one. Of course they may decide at some time in the future to start charging for upgrades but they're not making stupid "lifetime license" claims so nobody will complain if they do.

    If I compare the total cost of ownership of the brilliant Davinci Resolve and Fusion combo that I paid $300 for to the amount Adobe would have charged me (and still be charging me every month) I am so much better off financially that it's not funny. Even better... I'm not locked-into a cloud-based service that would see access to all my existing projects effectively disappear as soon as I stopped paying a monthly stipend.

    Yes, there *are* alternatives to "software as a service" monthly subscription rip-offs but you have to vote with your wallet if you want to support them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mattr ( 78516 )

      Wow! I checked out their website (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve) and looking at their Studio product I'm blown away. You should have led with that it is a professional grade solution. They even sell video editing studio equipment. I will definitely plan to buy it for my new Mac. I once used Adobe a lot but have never wanted to pay subscriptions. (Yes okay I do pay for MS Office 365 Solo like $100 a year or so, but it will work on any machine, gets upgrades and I was able to skip t

    • Four or five years ago I trialed Adobe's Premiere video editing suite and found it to be quite good. However, when I did some simple math it became obvious that the subscription model was going to be a huge financial penalty over the coming years so instead I opted to use Davinci Resolve.

      Resolve offers a totally *free* version of its video editing/compositing software (Adobe's trial was just a 28-day one) so that immediately warmed me to Resolve.

      After a couple of months using the *free* version of Resolve I plonked down my hard-earned cash (just US$300) to buy a "studio" license which gave me a few extra features and the satisfaction of supporting a company that was offering real value. At that time, Resolve was at version 14. Since then there have been six major new versions of the software and I'm now running the latest release. The total cost for these version upgrades has been... $0.00. Yep, Black Magic Design (the makers of Resolve) have offered all those updates and new versions to existing users at no extra cost.

      Resolve has never been sold with a "lifetime license" but this is surely as close as you can get to one. Of course they may decide at some time in the future to start charging for upgrades but they're not making stupid "lifetime license" claims so nobody will complain if they do.

      If I compare the total cost of ownership of the brilliant Davinci Resolve and Fusion combo that I paid $300 for to the amount Adobe would have charged me (and still be charging me every month) I am so much better off financially that it's not funny. Even better... I'm not locked-into a cloud-based service that would see access to all my existing projects effectively disappear as soon as I stopped paying a monthly stipend.

      Yes, there *are* alternatives to "software as a service" monthly subscription rip-offs but you have to vote with your wallet if you want to support them.

      Everything you just wrote is true while I am motivated to add a few details: Black Magic manufactures a ton of nice hardware [blackmagicdesign.com] seriously worth looking at and pretty much any purchase includes a free license of Da Vinci Resolve Studio, so that's like a $300 coupon from a certain perspective.

Slashdot Top Deals

Please go away.

Close